+John 1:1-18
Well, 7 days down five more to go in the Festive glories of Christmas, where we as the Church recall and celebrate with great joy the belief that at one time God became flesh and dwelt among us. Over the past weeks I’ve been wrestling with this text. I don’t know if it’s a type of homiletical writers block, or if it’s the mountains of Northern California that await my arrival this evening, but I can’t seem shake this one tiny phrase from this rather lengthy Gospel lesson.
‘And the Word became flesh and lived among us”
It seems odd that out of a passage of 18 verses all of which are pregnant and overflowing with theological, Christological, historical and poetical references and turns of phrase, this one small part has been a magnet of sorts over the past two weeks. Out of all the richness of the sometimes dizzying phrasing of St. John, the one that strikes home, particularly in this season is this small phrase. ‘And the word became flesh and lived among us.’
This portion of the Gospel was deemed so critical to the Christian life and it’s theological and Christological meaning so important for the early church that by the time of the Reformation and for Roman catholics this Gospel lesson was read at the conclusion of every Celebration of the mass until the Second Vatican Council, just following the blessings and dismissal as the congregation was about to leave. And, I suspect, if some of you grew up in High Church Anglo-Catholic parishes, you heard these words on a fairly regular basis. Its weekly and sometimes daily recitation was a scriptural pin-point on which the Church could not only point to their entire understanding of the role of Christ as a pre-emminent presence at the beginning of time, but more importantly it served as marching orders to remember that God at one time became one of us and experienced our experiences. Critical in Jesus’ incarnation, is the realized redemption of human kind in this life, in flesh and blood not in heavenly afterlife, but in a real corporeal fleshiness; and the divine possibilities made possible by the example of the life of Jesus Christ.
The Greek word John uses for flesh is sarx. John was specific in his word usage. He didn’t clean it up with niceties like God became a human, or that God became living. No, John uses the word sarx, one with not the greatest connotation. It’s the same word used for meat eaten at dinner, it is the material that is raw, bloody, perishable, and that festers when rotten. In no way clean or pure or as neutural as human.
So for John to juxtapose the divinity of God’s pure word that came from the beginning of all existence, where he says ‘In the Beginning was the Word and the word was with God, and the Word was God’ and for those divine words to enter something as frail and as perishable as ‘sarx’ or ‘flesh’ demonstrates the pure power of Divinity. Only power so divine, so self-differentiated, could come from a divine Being; one that was willing to cast aside the Holy of Holies and become one of us as a living example of the God’s Law, the word. For God to become human is the ultimate demonstration of the servant model of leadership we are called to in the ministries of our Church, our community, and our workplace.
Be mindful that God’s becoming flesh in no ways diminished the power or the divinity of God; quite the opposite is true. God’s incarnation in Jesus has, as today’s Psalm states, ‘Strengthened the bars of our gates’. God becoming a human being has strengthened and equipped us to take and consume God’s words and to be sustained by them; equipping us to become fit and wholesome members of Christ body, proclaiming to all that Love and hope and redemption has come near and that God is among us, that Jesus (whose name means ‘Yahweh is salvation’), that Jesus is our salvation.
God is here in the flesh, in our flesh through our baptisms, through our prayers and through our participation at God’s table. May the light of Jesus, our Salvation, by God’s Grace shine today and may the food of our Feast usher-in Christ’s presence so that our prayers and actions in the world will make known to all that the Word is flesh and lives among us.
* Harrington, Daniel J. Sacra Pagina Series, vol. 1: The Gospel of Matthew. Edited by Daniel Harrington, S.J. (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1991), pp. 100-106.
